Halloween, Week Four
"Longer than you think!"
Your mind can be your best friend; it can keep you amused even when there's nothing to read, nothing to do. But it can turn on you when it's left with no input for too long. It can turn on you, which means that it turns on itself, savages itself, perhaps consumes itself in an unthinkable act of auto-cannibalism.
How long in there, in terms of years? 0.000000000067 seconds for the body to Jaunt, but how long for the unparticulated consciousness? A hundred years? A thousand? A million? A billion?
How long alone with your thoughts in an endless field of white?
The Jaunt by Stephen King
Hello, friends.
We’re getting closer now.
For this penultimate entry in my series of Halloween recommendations, you may notice that I have forgone the ‘scariness rating.’ This is no accident. As you proceed, please assume that all further recommendations are intended to frighten. As always, one is all too aware that fear is a subjective experience, but I truly believe, now more than ever, that there is at least one thing on this list that will instill in you, dear reader, a feeling of dread and terror.
It is my greatest wish that you experience these feelings… only because it’s Halloween, of course.
23. My house walk-through
The description for this video, uploaded in 2016 by YouTube user nana825763, states clearly that “My house walk-through” is not a ‘horror video.’ “This video was created simply by filming inside my house,” it reads. The video is best experienced on these terms, even if it quickly becomes apparent that neither statement is entirely honest.
“My house walk-through” is closer to an art installation than a traditional horror narrative. It’s a mood piece that creates an eerie and anxious atmosphere through dreamlike repetition and slow accumulation of detail. To watch it all the way through is to submit to a sort of self-hypnosis in order to induce in oneself a mental state that is deeply unsettled but strangely calm – the perfect state of mind with which to approach the rest of the entries on this list.
24. “The Jaunt”
(Read it here.)
Here’s a little-known fact about Stephen King that will only be little-known if you’ve never met one of his fans: King’s best writing can actually be found in his short story collections. Obviously, King’s novels are great, and speaking as someone who had his brain permanently wrinkled by reading The Stand in high school, I would never argue against that fact. But Stephen King is a writer with some, shall we say, idiosyncrasies. Outdated slang, a weird obsession with 1950s culture, sudden and incongruous sexuality… the list goes on. Personally, I find myself cringing whenever his characters laugh uproariously at something that is deeply unfunny – this is part of the reason why I’ve never been a big fan of It.
None of these issues are present in his short fiction, and all you’re left with is his pure, uncut storytelling ability. Another “little-known” fact is that many of Stephen King’s stories eschew the horror genre altogether, but still, there’s a reason he’s considered a master of the form — when King focuses his energies on being scary, there are few people who have ever done it better. For an example, look no further than “The Jaunt,” which is often (for good reason) considered his scariest story.
“The Jaunt” of the title is a piece of futuristic sci-fi technology that allows for near-instantaneous teleportation across vast reaches of space. Most of the story is taken up by the narrator explaining the history of the jaunt to his children, but by the end, the framing story takes prominence. A common gripe about King is that he often fails to bring his stories to a satisfying ending, and while that’s true in some of his novels – only some! – it’s not a complaint anyone would have after reading “The Jaunt.” No matter how many times I read “The Jaunt,” my hands still get sweaty as I move towards the ending.
25. Jezebel Scary Stories Contest
(This year’s contest can be found here.)
A seasonal tradition that now stretches back a full decade, Jezebel’s annual scary stories contest might not be as much of an event as it was in the mid-2010s — particularly amongst people trying to kill time on their phones at work — but I still welcome its yearly return. The fact that the contest takes place on Jezebel and not one of the seedier or horror-obsessed parts of the internet means that the stories are being told by (and for) people who are, for lack of a better term, relatively normal. Because of this unique environment, any of these stories feel like they could be true, though of course, there’s no guarantee they are – this is still an internet comments section, after all, and any one of these people could be lying for any reason. This contradiction amplifies the trashy fun of the whole experience, and it means that when you do encounter a story that is clearly true – usually a woman’s story of a harrowing encounter with a man – the real-life horror is thrown into stark relief.
26. The Night House
In his acceptance speech for the 2022 Chainsaw Award for Best Screenplay, Night House writer Luke Piotrowski (accepting the award alongside co-writer Ben Collins) was discussing his own fear of mortality when he said something striking: “Wherever we’re going, even if it’s nowhere, we are all going there together in the end.” Piotrowski explained that he takes comfort in this notion, and when I heard him say this, it conjured up the same complex mix of emotions that I experienced after watching The Night House.
It’s difficult to explain my reaction without fully recounting the movie’s plot, which I don’t intend to do. It’s not a story filled with twists and turns, but the way it all unspools is highly deliberate, and it would be a shame to have that experience spoiled before seeing the movie — and make no mistake, if you enjoy horror at all, you should watch The Night House. The further I get from it, and the more I revisit it in my mind, the more convinced I am that it’s an all-time classic. The basic gist is that Rebecca Hall (better than she’s ever been, which is saying something) plays Beth, a woman struggling to cope in the wake of her husband’s suicide who begins to question everything she thought she knew about him when she discovers evidence of his secret double life.
The story that unfolds from there is equal parts haunted house, psychological mystery, and pure existential terror. The truth about Beth’s husband is horrifying but, after a number of well-timed reveals, ends in a place that I found strangely moving – your mileage may vary, of course. I don’t blame anyone for rolling their eyes at another modern horror film that’s “actually about trauma,” but believe me when I say that The Night House avoids getting bogged down in the specifics of one character’s grief and instead turns its gaze towards the great mystery of death, offering a final thought that is sober-minded yet ultimately comforting: even if there’s nothing after death, it’s a nothing that we will all share in.
27. TheLittleFears
TheLittleFears is a YouTube channel that was active from 2009 to 2013. Operated by an anonymous creator – identified only as “a nice Canadian woman with a soothing voice” – the channel is a curious relic of an earlier digital age, one where “YouTube culture” as we currently know it was still in its infancy. In this time before brand partnerships and high-definition video, there was still space for a mysterious collection of short, frightening videos to break through and make an impression on the lucky few who encountered it.
Scanning the comments on the now-abandoned page’s most recent videos, one gets the impression that TheLittleFears has been categorized alongside a variety of YouTube creators known as “Creepypasta Narrators” – basically, people who record themselves doing dramatic readings of their favorite online urban legends. I feel this does her work a great disservice, but in fairness, these videos are genuinely tough to classify. It’s unclear how much of the content on TheLittleFears is original; some videos, like “Candle Cove'', “The Portraits” or “Messenger,” are based on preexisting stories, while others like “Urban Exploration,” “I HATE SNOW” or “Re: Corrupted Bootleg” are more like short found-footage horror films. The text of some videos can be found on creepypasta aggregation websites, but on many occasions, that text was apparently posted after the upload date for the video.
Questions of authorship aside, it’s clear from any of the videos on this channel that the person responsible is gifted at creating an intensely creepy mood within a short span of time using only a few elements. This skill is on display in the three videos I want to share with you, which are my personal favorites. The videos are so short that I don’t think it’s helpful to preface them too much, except to say that the first one (“Curiosity”) still gives me goosebumps after all these years.
28. Ghostwatch
(Watch it for free on Internet Archive.)
I first saw Ghostwatch ten years ago at a weekend-long horror movie marathon, one that was curated by people with a real love of the genre and all the varying moods it contains. Programming two full days of movies requires a strong sense of balance, meaning that some of the films being shown were classics intended for vocal appreciation, while some were the kind of trash that’s fun to goof on. Overall, the mood was light, pleasant, and chatty – the appropriate atmosphere for a social event – and that mood still pervaded the room when Ghostwatch started. After the first half-hour, things had started to quiet down. Another half-hour went by and hardly anyone was talking, and by the end, the entire room was sitting in rapt silence. When it was over, I was genuinely shaken.
Last year, curious if it would still be effective, I half-convinced, half-tricked my wife into watching it with me by (allegedly) implying that I had never seen it before. As soon as it started, I found that the opening moments, where the light-spirited mood of the movie matched that of the room I first saw it in, now filled me with a deep dread. That feeling only grew as the story played out and by the end I found myself deeply unnerved, while my wife was, to put it frankly, fucking scared as shit.
Starring real-life British television presenters and shot convincingly in the style of a non-fiction 1990s television broadcast, Ghostwatch has the highest level of verisimilitude of any mockumentary or found-footage horror film I’ve ever seen. If you’re the kind of person who got mad at The Last Exorcism for having a non-diegetic score, this is extremely satisfying on an aesthetic level, but more importantly, it means that the horror can build convincingly from a very believable place so that you’re primed to follow the story until it finally makes the jump over the top into next-level terror.
29. The Nightmare
Rodney Ascher’s follow-up to Room 237 is one of the only movies to ever negatively impact my quality of life. It’s not just that the experience of sleep paralysis as described by the participants in this documentary is horrifying – it is – but the way Ascher visualizes their experiences is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, especially in a non-fiction film. This might not be the only documentary with bona fide jump scares, but it’s certainly the only one I’ve ever seen.
Even apart from moments of genuine shock, the dramatic recreations in The Nightmare are soaked in a dreadfully surreal atmosphere that is ‘dream-like’ in the most literal (and frightening) sense. The distortion of physical reality, the uncanny voices speaking in garbled English, the blurring between dreams and reality… it all adds up to the most accurate depiction of dreams I’ve ever seen.
I saw this film in 2015 at the IFC Center in Manhattan – not exactly surrounded by people, but far from alone – and I spent nearly the entire runtime glued to the back of my chair, staring up at the screen in dull horror. Worst of all, the movie ends with the fairly convincing argument that simply hearing other people describe their sleep paralysis – i.e., the entirety of the preceding film – is enough to trigger the same symptoms in the listener. I slept with the light on every night for the next year.
Even now, there are nights when I’m drifting off to sleep only to have one of the POV shots from The Nightmare pop into my head. I blink my eyes, lift my hands, pinch myself — anything to prove that I’m still awake. It’s enough to dispel the fear, but only temporarily. After all, I have to go to sleep eventually, and when you’re asleep, you’re never really safe.
See you next week.